February 14 is back. It’s valentine’s day. On Twitter, we shall be told by the riot-wing toadies that “it’s a western festival”, while OYO rooms will be busily occupied by the young bees on this day.
The land of Kama Sutra shies to talk about love and sex openly, and yet it is cheerful about its overpopulated labour force. On the other hand, hate crimes on the ground rose by 300% in a span of seven years (since 2014).
Consumer Culture Determines Who We Can Love
It becomes difficult to understand this nation. Is it willing to love so that it’s social health gets enriched, or is it lacking the right amount of dopamine to be released?
I ask you:
The land of the Kama Sutra has clearly forgotten the art of loving. Is it because our secular nation is on a mission to establish a Hindu rashtra (nation)? Or are we being socialised to transcend love with hate and call it the ‘new’ brotherhood? There’s something inherently wrong in the way we perceive love in today’s time, isn’t it?
Love, as commonly known, is often and selfishly toned down to family and personal relationships—thanks to the consumerist culture that is subtly leading the pack in the market on how, whom, and when we should love.
Whereas, love, with its own inherent properties, is strong enough to put a full stop and not a comma (to the stream of hate). In my observations of today’s social atmosphere, the case of the latter is nowhere to be seen, when compared to the former.
Valentine’s Day Can Be Tough For Singles
As intended, love is supposed to normally integrate and value the people of this society, but sadly, it has peaked to the point of subjective and selective experiences. Having said that, hate has emerged as the new love.
Love, as a power, can transform a demon into an angel, but we have very much equated it with sexual intimacy, patriarchal notions, and physical constituents.
Love: it’s a necessity without which life is banal. It’s a feeling as well as a means to socialise with the people we sometimes end up with.
Valentine’s day, arguably the worst day of the year to be single, finds us all reflecting on all the “what-went-wrongs” and “could-have-been”‘ in our romantic lives.
It’s Not You, It’s Not Me Either
We are often taught that the breakdown of relationships solely comes down to individualised problems and reasons which are centered around our personalities, or lifestyles.
Perhaps “it’s not you, it’s me” is somehow a more palatable narrative than “it’s not you, it’s 1000 years of repressive, elitist, draconian, social norms.” Because what if it’s not you, or me, but something bigger?
Stopping to consider external factors and the wider structures of our society that have an impact on our relationships, particularly in the desi context, we can’t help but notice that they sometimes play a hand in the reason relationships don’t work. Or, rather, aren’t given the space or conditions to work and to flourish.
The culture of desi parenting, Bollywood movies, social anxieties, misogyny, classism, and casteism are misguiding the way we are supposed to love.
Is Love Only About How Much You Can Provide?
Love, today, has become consumerist in nature, and we inevitably buy into that from the constant targeting of adverts, social media, and everyone else around us doing the same.
This manifests into materialism, reducing the concept of love to an economic transaction, a formality, or a sexual contract, while at the same time distracting us away from the realities of whether love is real or not.
How many aunties have happily chirped: “haan beta (yes, child), the spark will come, but see what a nice *insert random gifting object here* he’s given you!” As though desiring a person could so easily be substituted with desirable objects.
This fixation on desirable objects transcends the niceties of gift-giving, having the larger effect of upholding patriarchal structures and norms, feeding into the power dynamics that already exist in many relationships wherein the man is entitled to hold the dominant position.
Marital Rape Is Still Legal In India
“I provide x, therefore I am owed y” can be a dangerous gateway to compulsion, and the normalisation of intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, and marital rape—issues which India and the wider subcontinent struggles with, at every level of the society.
India remains one of 36 countries in the world where marital rape is not illegal, but permitted by exception 2, Section 375 of the Indian constitution.
It exempts acts of unwilling sexual intercourse by a husband with his wife who is over the age of 15, from being counted as rape. Yes, you read that correctly… 15!
The trouble here is that, in India, very little of what we have been told to believe about love is actually about love at all.
Of Caste, Consent And Community
This void of discussion leads us to believe that love is about anything but caring, concern, respect for one another, affection. Rather, love gets tagged as the composite Frankenstein of religion, economic viability, entitlement, ownership, duty, and of course: caste.
How strange then, that in a culture that places so much importance on “protecting the value of marriages”, the value of love itself is rendered null and void.
Is it any surprise then, that those same marriages built on this foundation result in some of the strangest social experiments any of us have the joy of encountering?
Do a quick mental poll of your whole extended family. How many of the married couples have relationships one might call “healthy”, let alone “happy”? So, what does that say about the dynamic of our perception of love?
When caste is an issue worth killing over, but consent isn’t even worth a judicial charge, and “community” is wielded like a weapon… What space is left for love?
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Note: The author has borrowed some points in this piece from a previous article published here.